Essays

When Oliver Sacks died on Aug. 30 of last year, at 82, the world lost a beloved author and neurologist. I lost my partner.

Oliver hated that term: partner. “A partner is what one has in business,” he would say, bristling, “not in bed, not in the kitchen next to you making dinner.” The man was nothing if not meticulous about words. We’d never married — never wanted to — so “husband” was out, and “companion” was too euphemistic. Oliver was old-fashioned: He preferred the word “lovers.” We loved each other; that said it.

Thinking back on my life with Oliver, two episodes from his last year come to mind, each revealing something of the private and public Dr. Sacks. The first took place at home in late November 2014, two months before he learned of his terminal cancer diagnosis. Read the rest of this post »

I SAW a girl on a Manhattan-bound subway train one day wearing a knockoff Louis Vuitton head scarf and false eyelashes long enough to make a daddy longlegs envious. Her look — a sort of Sally-Bowles-does-Brooklyn — was complete with a matching knockoff L.V. handbag and umbrella. She was seated next to a young man who was as dashing in his way as she was adorable, but she took no notice of him as she was completely absorbed in a paperback titled something like “Becoming a Practical Thinker.”

I had an impulse to tear the book from her hands.

“Don’t do that,” I wanted to say. “Practicality will not get you where you want to go.”

When you go — not if, but when (and soon, by the way; the show closes Sept. 21) — I suggest you bring a thesaurus. Because it wasn’t long before we found words failing us. An image of an acrobat caught midleap on a Manhattan street, for instance, struck the three of us as the epitome of “amazing.” So did another photo. Then another. Upon seeing the first few dozen of the more than 175 prints on view we pledged that we would not use that word to describe every single photo. Beautiful, incredible, joyful, strange, very sad — we made it as far as the second room before we were back to the A’s.

I started writing this essay five years ago, and then I stopped. That I was not able to finish the piece did not strike me at the time as ironic but as further proof that whatever I once had in me — juice, talent, will — was gone. In any case, completing it would have made moot the very point I was attempting to make: Not writing can be good for one’s writing; indeed, it can make one a better writer.

I hadn’t given up writing deliberately, and I cannot pinpoint a particular day when my not-writing period started, any more than one can say the moment when one is overtaken by sleep: It’s only after you wake that you realize how long you were out. Nor did I feel blocked at first. Lines would come to me then slip away, like a dog that loses interest in how you are petting it and seeks another hand. This goes both ways. When I lost interest in them, the lines gradually stopped coming. Before I knew it, two years had passed with scarcely a word.

MY 30-year-long subscription to The New Yorker ran out a few months ago — pure absent-mindedness on my part — and since then I buy a copy each week at the smoke shop around the corner from my apartment.

It makes no sense financially. I could save 73 percent off the cover price if I renewed for just a year; even more for two. But I’ve found I enjoy the benefits that come with my $6.99 a week, beginning with Ali, the shop’s manager.

Ali had formerly known me as a customer who occasionally came in late at night for a single vanilla Häagen-Dazs bar and asked for a book of matches. The asking part is important. He once told me about a customer who reached over the counter for a book of matches from the box next to the register:

I say “I”; it was my email account, but it felt — feels still — deeply personal. It started on a Tuesday at exactly 7:20 a.m. E.S.T. I know because I received a text message at that time saying that my email password had just been changed. If I had made this change, I need not “take any action.” But if not, “click this link.”

I was bleary, jet-lag weary, having returned the night before from 10 days’ traveling in Europe, but I was quite sure I had changed nothing but my sheets since getting home. Right then, a message from a friend popped up on my Facebook page delivering the news that something was amiss: “Just received a strange email from you asking for money. Change your password.”

WHEN the news broke recently that a team of Belgian scientists had “discovered” a new body part — a ligament located just outside the knee — the first place my mind went was to Padua.

Padua is the small city in northern Italy where the 16th-century Brussels-born scientist Andreas Vesalius taught anatomy and created his history-making masterpiece, “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” (“On the Fabric of the Human Body”), published in 1543. The old man would have been delighted by the news, I couldn’t help thinking.

Vesalius’s wasn’t the first book on anatomy, but it was the first detailed study based entirely on actual dissection of human cadavers — on scientific fact, not supposition. It systematically dismantled the error-filled doctrine of Galenism, which rested in part on animal rather than human anatomy and had held sway for 14 centuries. But in mapping the inner body, Vesalius didn’t get everything right.

I know New Yorkers who last took a subway in their twenties, thirty years ago, or who would rather be stuck in traffic any day than on an express train anyplace. Someday I, too, may know the luxury of a town car and driver or what it’s like to always take a taxi home. But until those hypothetical ships come in, all I can know is what I am now: a subway rider.

During my first year in New York, I took the A/C line to work each day. The West Fourth Street station was five minutes from my apartment. My favorite time was early morning. The station wasn’t crowded yet, riders weren’t rushed. People did not talk but read or listened to iPods. The smokers hacked their smokers’ coughs. Water drops—rusty tears in winter, I’d imagine, beads of sweat in summer—leaked from the steel I-beams overhead. The air was soft, as if unfinished dreams still emanated from everyone’s skin.

SOMEONE asked me the other day how I had gotten over the sudden death of someone I loved. What I wanted to say but found myself unable to explain (for it would have sounded too strange) was that I learned a good deal about moving through grief from some trees I once knew. They were not my trees. I didn’t plant them. I lived in an apartment surrounded by them. The only tending done was to give them my full attention over the course of four seasons.

When I moved in it was April, still cold, and the branches were bare. Facing northeast, my view of Manhattan was unobstructed, seen through a latticework veil. There were five trees, each distinct. They were not beautiful. My next-door neighbor, a landscape designer, told me that the species, Ailanthus altissima, is an urban weed. But I never expected beauty. That they were tall and strong and present was enough. I found that Ailanthus derives from an Indonesian word meaning “tree of heaven.”

Middle age arrives not with a birthday, with 48 candles on an angel food cake, but with a sudden unbidden insight in the middle of a sleepless night. You roll over and eye the clock and see all at once that the phrase “anything is possible” is not true. That is, it is no longer true for you, if it ever was. You are not going to become a doctor, or run a marathon or have a baby or sail around the world on a solo voyage documented by National Geographic. You simply haven’t the time, the feet, the eggs, or possibly even the desire required to mount such elaborate dream sequences.

In a way, this comes as a relief. When possibilities stop being endless, you can narrow the choices. Indeed, you can make hard choices, without resorting to dreams, without relying on maps, without abandoning duty. Is that not what wisdom is? Knowing when to unload what one will not need or use before approaching the next bridge.